[NewsPoster]

We were only just saying that Calendar is one of the few little disappointments on Apple Watch, and now Flexibits has released Fantastical 2.3 for iOS, which solves two of those little letdowns in one fell swoop. They're big enough that this is a reason to buy Fantastical, but if you get it for the Apple Watch, then you are also getting an excellent iPhone calendar.

Flexibits reports that the app has various fixes and improvements, but they don't list them, and we don't care: we instantly grabbed this for its Apple Watch capabilities. Those are that you can now see more days on the calendar, and you can add events directly on your Watch.

You add them by opening the app -- or tapping on Fantastical's optional Glance on your Watch face -- and then Force Touching. That gets you an Add Event button, and when you press that, you get to dictate what you want. The excellent thing about this is that Fantastical appears to be as good at understanding us speaking on the Watch as it is our typing on the Mac or iOS devices. "Lunch with Angela on Friday" is fine.

On iOS, you would see each bit of that, word by word, slot into the calendar as it first presumed 'lunch' meant today, then added a label 'with Angela' and finally shifted it all to this coming Friday at 1pm. If you're having a late lunch, say "Lunch with Angela 2pm on Friday" instead. It couldn't be better.

The Apple Watch could, on the other hand, have done it better. That parsing of the information you're entering doesn't happen so visibly, and instead what you unfortunately often see is that Siri doesn't appear to be listening. That happened a fair few times in our testing of Fantastical, but while we put that down to the Apple Watch because we've seen this in other apps, there's reason to suspect it will be more common in this calendar app. That reason is the other big improvement, the fact that you can see more days than in Apple's offering.

The Fantastical iOS app's settings say your choice is between today and "many days." Right now, it's showing us today and about 11 further days, which is four more than Apple's own Calendar. That's about a third more data to load in, and at times Fantastical is slow -- most likely because it's getting that data from your iPhone. We only noticed most when we first launched the app, after that it was quick to get in and out of, but there were times when slowness was the problem with Siri.

We'd sometimes find that Siri would take a while to catch on that we were speaking, and if it didn't do so before the Watch face switched off, Fantastical abandoned the new event. We ended up twirling the Digital Crown just to keep the screen active, but then we like that crown, and thus we tend to do that anyway.

Very nicely, very nicely, you're not limited to the days you can see when you're entering events. We tried adding events that are two months away, and it worked. They didn't show up in Fantastical on the Apple Watch, but they did on our iPhones. That's excellent, and beyond handy, it's essential: if we'd had to remember whether this event could be entered on the Watch and this other one couldn't, we'd never use the Watch.

Still, entering events is slower than we'd like. It's still faster than getting out your phone, though.

It feels as if Fantastical is pushing at the very limits of what developers can do with Apple Watch at the moment. Things will change when Apple allows greater access, so we're sure Flexibits will improve the speed and add further features. One we'd really like to see is the ability to delete calendar events from the Watch as well. As it stands, even with Fantastical, you can neither delete nor edit any events.

So you will use the Watch features in concert with Fantastical's iPhone app, but you'd want to regardless: the iPhone app is very good. One thing we particularly like about it that has come across to the Watch is that now it displays events.

On the Watch, Apple's Calendar shows you a day as 24 hours of blankness, interspersed with blocks of color where your events are. Fantastical just ignores all the blankness. Instead, you get a continuous roll of color blocks that show you event after event. It's clearer than that sounds, you are never in doubt when one event ends and another begins.

Except there is one thing to do with this that we'd like to see added to both the Watch and iOS versions of Fantastical. Currently, if you don't happen to have any events on Wednesday, then Fantastical's list of color blocks simply skips Wednesday, the same way it skips over blank hours in your schedule. The result is that we have many times looked at our Fantastical calendar and assumed a day was full or, equally problematic, assumed an event was a day earlier than it really was. We'd like to see the day displayed, even when there are no events: it would add to the length of the list, but we just need the name of the day, nothing else. Show us "Wednesday" immediately followed by "Thursday," and we'd be happy.

If there are features we'd like to see added to Fantastical, then there are still plenty enough there right now that mean this went straight on our Watches, and it is staying there. We switched off the Glance for Apple's own Calendar. That's chiefly because Fantastical brings these two big improvements -- the extra days and the ability to add an event -- but it does also bring smaller improvements.

We just prefer the Fantastical Glance to the Apple Calendar one. That's partly aesthetic, but while both Glances show you the next event, Fantastical's also gives you an indication of how busy your whole day is. There's a small graphic conveying all of your events: not in any detail, not in any way you can select, but at glance you can see this afternoon is going to be hell.

One thing: Fantastical isn't only a calendar app, it also has To Do tasks in it. Hand on heart, we've ignored that before, because we don't think tasks and dates go together; if you say you'll pick up paint on Tuesday but something else comes up, you have to move the task. It's the same task, and you've still got to do it, but because you assigned it a date on a whim, you have to spend time moving it around. Also, if you have a vital report due on Friday, it's not a huge amount of use getting a reminder to start it on that same Friday.

Your mileage and opinion may vary, and if it does, then Fantastical has the added bonus for you of including task reminders. There is no version of Apple's own Reminders app on the Watch, so if you like that kind of thing, you're back in luck. We'd just far sooner recommend OmniFocus for tasks on Apple Watch, as it's built solely for To Dos, and we think that shows in its features and robustness. Just as we think Fantastical shows great features and robustness for its chief function, the calendar.

Fantastical 2.3 for iPhone and Apple Watch requires iOS 8.3 or later, and costs $5 in the App Store. There is a separate Fantastical 2 for iPad, which costs $10 in the App Store, and another separate Fantastical 2 for Mac, which is currently $40 in the Mac App Store.

Who is Fantastical 2.3 for:
It's better than Apple's Calendar on the Watch: if you use that calendar, switch to Fantastical. Bonus: you get an excellent iPhone app with it.

Who is Fantastical 2.3 not for:
If you don't have a lot of events, or if they're all mapped out for months and you rarely need to add any new ones, the supplied Calendar is fine.

-- William Gallagher (@WGallagher)